Virtual Insider

Hyper-V Quick Tip and Windows Azure Assessment Tool

Quick Tip #1: Today I want to cover a quick Microsoft Hyper-V tip that is simple and very straight forward in nature but seems to go overlooked with many customers.

For those of you that were not aware, there is a Hyper-V Administrators group available locally to every Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 which can allow any member to have full Hyper-V administrative control without necessarily belonging to the Local Administrators group on that machine.

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Figure 2. A quick tip for those who tend to ignore role-based access settings in Hyper-V.

Like I said this is a quick tip but one that seems to go overlooked. I highly recommend that you enforce role-based access within your environment if you don't do so already, and leveraging these built-in, pre-defined groups is most definitely the first step in the right direction.

Quick Tip #2: Last week, Microsoft released a new tool to help you assess workloads and guide you through how to migrate these workloads to the cloud. The tool is called Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine Readiness Assessment and you can download it here.

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Figure 2. Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine Readiness Assessment does more than what the name implies.

Don't let the name of the tool mislead you. While it specifically references virtual machine, once installed the tool will crawl your infrastructure -- both physical and virtual -- and search for Active Directory, SQL, and SharePoint servers.

Once identified, it will then give you detailed recommendations and guidance on how to migrate these workloads onto Microsoft Azure.